the Carnegie and the Stage. "Lots of re- marks about Jews and blacks," Willard observed, "yet we haven't even mentioned Pearl Harbor." "A few years ago," he said, after a moment, "I was in Cleveland, where I grew up, and I looked up my dad's death certificate at City Hall. I was twelve when he died, in 1951. He died after dropping off Christmas gifts to a cus- tomer-he worked at a financing com- pany, it was all a little vague. They said he usually turned to wave after he got in his car, and this time he didn't. Heart failure. I went down to the intersection listed on the certificate, a Buick deal- ership, and it was very touching. He was Fred Willard, and I was Fred Wil- lard. He was a pretty stem guy, though. I don't remember much joking, never much encouragement. My wife hates all these visits, going to see the graves. 'The people aren't there!' she says. And I say, 'But this is the closest we can get to them.' " He gazed out at Times Square, perhaps seeing past the Jum- boT ron dazzle to the Tenderloin of de- cades past. "If it was up to me, nothing would ever change, no one would ever die. On the other hand," he added, "then no one could have babies, either, because it would get too crowded." - Tad Friend POSTSCRIPT BARBARA EPSTEIN A merican magazines, including this one, do not begin fully formed. They start out, depending on the times, with high spirits or with a stern sense of mission, but the idea itself: the com- plete set of ingredients that might make a magazine distinctive enough to last- that's almost never in place. And yet when The New York Review of Books made its début--Volume 1, No.1, dated February 1, 1963, appeared in the midst of a four-month-Iong print- ers' strike at the Times-the idea for an intellectually vigorous books magazine was so perfectly cooked, and its found- ing editors, Barbara Epstein and Rob- ert Silvers, so skilled and connected, that an extended family of friends and sympathizers rushed to fill the chairs at a vast table of contents. The poets Auden and Warren, Lowell and Ber- ryman were there; Dwight MacDon- aId, Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, and F. W. Dupee were among the critics; Elizabeth Hard- wick, William Styron, Mary McCarthy, and Norman Mailer all set fiction aside for the moment and wrote essays. And that's only the half of it. The result was surely the best first issue of any maga- ZIne ever. Epstein and Silvers, who were then in their mid-thirties, never wrote for their own magazine, except ceremoni- ally. But their sense of mission did not lack for ambition, or even ego; their ed- itors' note in the first issue said that the Review, if it ever took off, would not bother to write about books "trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a tempo- rarily inflated reputation or to call at- tention to a fraud." None of the writ- ers got paid for their efforts, the editors announced; Volume 1, No.1 was really just an experiment "to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review but the demand for " one. The Times soon returned, of course, but, by June, so, too, had the fledgling Review, and for forty-three years Ep- stein and Silvers kept it going at the highest level. "The whole thing was so Judy Gar- land and Mickey Rooney," Barbara would always say. "A bunch of friends thought it all up at dinner one night and the next thing you know the show was on-forever!" They really did it all themselves, or nearly so. The two worked in adjoin- ing offices, and, like the fabled Col- lyer Brothers, they were dwarfed by a perilous cityscape of galleys and man- uscripts that always seemed in danger of toppling, and crushing them. Into their seventies, they worked the hours of first-year law students. Any writer hop- ing to call the main number with the idea of leaving an apologetic voice mes- sage on, say, Tuesday at 2 A.M.-"Sorry! But I swear the piece will be in . . . very soon!" -would more than likely get Bob ("New York Review!") or Barbara ("Um- m-m . . . ye-es-s-s?"). Barbara used to call the office a kind f " d ." d h o ma-an -pa operatIon, an t at was true even after the sale of the paper to a benevolent Mississippian, Rea Heder- man, in 1984. (Barbara always called it that-"the paper"-as if a biweekly fea- turing, say, Isaiah Berlin on the origins of Fascism, Murray Kempton on Mus- solini, and Joan Didion on the Una- bomber were no less ephemeral than the daily reporting of Cindy Adams.) The rest of the editorial staff: like the court of a small duchy, has always been very loyal and unimaginably small. Now Silvers, who is seventy-six, will edit the Review alone. Barbara Epstein died earlier this month, of lung cancer. For all the seriousness of Barbara's work, and for all the time she put into it, her friends knew her as perhaps the least self-serious serious person imag- inable. Personal warmth and oblique suggestion was her editorial technique. ("This bit," she would say gently, point- ing to the weak underbelly of a man- uscript. 'Well, it's brilliant, of course, but it might be a little broad, do you know?") Her favorite compliment was "divine." In this, she was democratic. Her young writers--and there were many-were divine. The pizza at Orso was divine. J amba Juice was divine. Fred MacMurray in "Alice Adams" was di- vine. "The 40- Y ear-Old Virgin" was di- vine. She loved a party; she loved gossip and fun. She seemed to know every- body, and once, when a young writer eagerly asked her what a particular ce- lebrity was "really like," she smiled her wicked, pursed smile, lowered her eye- lids, and said, 'Well, she's a masochist, which is always adorable!" In 1953, Edmund Wilson encoun- tered Barbara while she was on her hon- eymoon, a transatlantic voyage aboard the Île de France with bottles of cham- pagne supplied by Doubleday, where both Barbara and her husband, Jason Epstein, were editors. As Wilson re- counts in his diaries, he (and Buster Kea- ton) spent a night drinking and dining with the Epsteins. But it wasn't until the sixties, with the rise of the Review, Wilson thought, that Barbara, "who be- fore was so quiet and kept herself in the background," came fully into her own. "I spent a good deal of the time sit- ting on the stairs with Barbara Epstein," Wilson wrote of aNew Year's Eve party at Lillian Hellman's place in 1965. "I have never seen her so vivid, so good- looking and so amusing. The Review has done a lot for her." -David Remnick THE NEW YORKER, JULY 3, 2006 27